


Last Man Standing

by Thea_Bromine



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-10
Updated: 2015-04-10
Packaged: 2018-03-22 05:24:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3716755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thea_Bromine/pseuds/Thea_Bromine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every applicant has an interview with the Head Watcher.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Man Standing

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings – Mentions of character death. Really, though? Nothing here.
> 
> British spelling because I’m not resetting my spell-checker now.
> 
> The characters you recognise belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. Sanne Wilding belongs to me.
> 
> Nomination [Sunnydale Memorial Fanfiction Awards](http://sunnydawards.dragonydreams.com/index.html), Round 31
> 
>  
> 
> [ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/125573331@N03/17023347709)  
> 

He followed her through the door, waved her to a chair, and sat down behind the big heavy desk, allowing her a few seconds to glance around the room. There were books _everywhere_ , feathered with handwritten notes, piled up under legal pads, weighed down with artefacts she didn’t recognise, and some she did. There were books properly shelved, and books heaped on other books. Every space seemed to have a book in it.

Except one.

She dragged her attention back to him; he was watching her with a faint patient smile, and she blushed. She had never been in this office before, although of course she had seen him around the building several times. She knew who he was. _Everybody_ knew who he was: he’d been the Head of the Watchers for years. He had all the Watching experience in the world: he’d been there in the Sunnydale days and constantly afterwards, through the big fights that were all but legends, through the changes from a single Slayer to teams, through the collapse of the old Council and the creation of the new one. He was an old man now, not just by Watcher standards but by the standards of the outside world. He didn’t patrol any more; he moved carefully, protecting the damaged knee. He didn’t even help with fight training any more; the eyesight was obviously an issue and apparently his hearing was beginning to fail as well. He allowed her to stare at him for a few seconds, at the thick grey hair, at the scars, at the old-fashioned clothing. His spectacles clicked on the table as he laid them down, examining her with as much interest as she showed in him.

“You know who I am, obviously, but I don’t know very much about you except that your name is Sanne Wilding, you arrived here last week and you want to be a Watcher.”

She nodded, and then got herself together enough to speak. “Yes. Please.”

“How old are you?”

She was nineteen, and he nodded approvingly when she said so. Everybody knew _that_ too – that he disapproved of signing up Watchers too young. He asked about her education, and she told him about her schools. “I wanted to go to university in Amsterdam but there was no money for it at home. I looked to see if I could work as well, but…” She shrugged. “And then I learned about the Slayers and I thought I could help.” It sounded foolish now that she said it out loud.

“But you’re not a Potential.”

“No.” Her voice cracked. “I don’t think I would like that.”

He gave a snort of dry amusement. “If you did like it, you would almost certainly be unsuited to it. You would need to learn enough to patrol with your Slayer. Can you do that? Can you learn to fight?”

She nodded. “I was on my school fencing team, and I did some gymnastics until I was fifteen.”

“Why Amsterdam?”

She blinked at him, and caught up. “My mother is Dutch. My father was – is – American but he left when I was still a baby. He has a new wife now, his fourth. There are other children. My mother was the first wife. He stopped paying for me a few years after he went back to America, when he married his second wife. My mother took me to my grandparents’ home in Lelystad. My grandfather died not long after, in an accident, so…” She shrugged again. “But as I say, there is no money for university. I would like – I would _have_ liked – to study Anthropology, but with no definite job afterwards, you see?”

“What _is_ it about broken families and Watchers and Slayers? There’s money if you sign up to be a Watcher. I don’t believe we’ve ever placed a Trainee Watcher in Amsterdam – UCLA… not Sunnydale any more, obviously, Yale, Kansas, Boston, a couple in Australia, plenty in Europe, Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Geneva, Dublin…” He reached for a notepad. “I don’t know much about Amsterdam; we would have to check it out. If there’s no suitable course, would you be willing to go elsewhere?”

She swallowed hard, and nodded.

“We pay all academic fees – well, they depend on where you’re going, the rules aren’t the same in any two places. We pay rent, reasonable living expenses and a small salary on top. Our terms are that you don’t take on any other paid employment because we do expect you to take on some specific training as well. We take one full weekend per month, one evening per week, and one week in three of your vacation time. If you do this, Sanne, you’ll work hard. If you fail any of the exams, university or Watcher, you go on probation; we don’t pay for students to behave…” he smiled grimly, “like students. You’ll have a mentor. If you’re failing because the work’s too hard, we’ll help. If you’re failing because you aren’t putting in the hours, you get one warning; fail a second time and the deal’s off.”

Her mouth was dry and her breath came a little fast. “Has that ever… have you done that? Sent people away?”

He met her gaze. “We’re trying to weed out the unsuitable candidates _before_ they get to full Watcher status. We had some… bad experiences. People who came to Watching because that was all their families had ever done, or because they thought it was the easy option, or because they’d been told so young that they had to do it, that they didn’t know how to say no. It didn’t always end well.”

She’d heard that story, from the trainee Watcher who had looked after her when she arrived. She knew what he was talking about. That specific ‘not ending well’ had been… she hoped that the details she had heard about demon raising and dead people were exaggerated. She rather thought they weren’t.

He was watching her, knowingly. She set her shoulders. “I can work hard, Professor.”

He smiled at her, surprisingly sweetly. “Let’s have a look at the details, then. Shall we have some coffee?”

Her head was spinning by the time she started to gather the papers in front of her. He had spelled out what a Watcher was expected to know, and to do, and what she would be taught and what she would need to learn on her own. She understood better now about the piles of books: this stuff simply wasn’t available on line or summarised in anthologies or reference texts. If she wanted to know what was said in the _Book of the Rising Man_ , then she would have to read it. If she needed to understand the _Prophecies of the Knot_ , then she would have to study them herself. There were no shortcuts. The reference cards that he had mentioned early on were digital now, rather than physical, but they still involved somebody – some Watcher – actually _reading_ the original books and deciding what needed to go on the cards.

And that was the easy end of the work, he had told her. Every Watcher spent some time in the field. She would have to stake a vampire even before she started serious training; some people couldn’t do it, couldn’t kill something that even _looked_ alive, and the Council wouldn’t waste resources on them. It sounded harsh, and he admitted as much, but it was how they did things. She was beginning to understand what she was signing up for, and it scared her.

“Second thoughts?” He was watching her, shrewdly.

“No!”

His eyebrow went up, and she grimaced. “Well… Yes. I still want to do it, but… It’s… it’s like you made it real.”

His turn to grimace. “It’s real, all right.”

She shook her head, frustrated. “That’s not the right word. Serious?” She waved vaguely at the walls around them. “I mean, I understood about the books, Professor, and the learning and so on, and we’ve talked about fighting, about going out with a Slayer. Everybody tells us that it’s dangerous, but suddenly…”

“Suddenly you understand in your gut as well as in your head that you could die.”

She couldn’t help herself; she looked at the one space on the one shelf that didn’t contain books, at the photograph. He nodded.

“If you had told me back then that I would be the last of the four of us left alive, I would have laughed in your face. I always thought I would be the first to go.”

She glanced at him, and turned her gaze hastily away from his expression. He reached for the frame and brought it down, setting it in front of her. Her voice cracked and squeaked. “That’s… the original… that’s from Sunnydale?”

He nodded. “I expect you know what happened to the others.”

She did – or at least, she had been told, but she kept silent. His finger tapped the glass gently. “He died in Cleveland. Wasn’t even anything to do with… A chest infection, and then pneumonia, and then he was gone. No reason for it: he didn’t have a history of anything like that. Just bad luck. Ridiculously young to…” To her horror, his voice cracked; his finger moved.

“That’s Buffy. The Slayer. She was ridiculously young too, to die. Not for a Slayer, I suppose. They don’t… They do die young. She was thirty-five which is old for a Slayer. Not so much now: now we have a retirement plan. When she was Chosen, the average life expectancy for a Slayer was twenty-two. Most of them make forty now as active Slayers, and then we take them out of the field when they’re slowing noticeably. In Buffy’s day there wasn’t any such thing as a retired Slayer, and all the training was done by the Watcher. Now we want the ex-Slayers to run the training.”

“How did she die?” She wasn’t certain that he heard her; his finger moved delicately over the glass, but after a moment he answered her.

“A nest of vampires in Berlin, in a condemned building. They cornered her on an upper floor. She killed seventeen, but they had a Loir demon and when the vampire that controlled it was staked – she did that – it escaped back to its own dimension by vaporising the roof. Three Slayers were killed as the building collapsed, including Buffy.”

His finger moved again, slowly; she found herself looking at his knuckles, at the swollen joints and the age spots, rather than at the laughing girl under his touch.

“That’s Willow.”

“The witch.” Her voice sounded odd in her own ears. She didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want to meet his eye, but her head lifted slowly, as if he had put his fingers under her chin, until she saw the pain in his gaze.

“It’s true, what you heard,” he said gently. “I loved her – I loved them all – but her, particularly.”

He lips moved, but she didn’t know what she wanted to say, or even if she wanted to say anything.

“She was a hugely talented witch. Clever, powerful… But after he died,” and he dabbed his finger at the photograph again, “she… lost her direction. It wasn’t the first time.”

“The Resurrection Spell…” she whispered. He nodded.

“We thought she knew, we thought she understood why it had been a bad idea, even though…” He trailed off, staring at the face in the picture. She thought she understood. Even though it had seemed the right thing to do at the time. Even though it had started the thread that had led to the Potentials being activated. Even though it had been the first step towards Spike’s soul, and the return of Angel and the sealing of the Hellmouth. He turned his head slightly, meeting her eyes.

“The thing about clichés and snappy phrases is how many of them actually do say something you should know. The road to hell, Sanne, really is paved with good intentions. Willow… Willow came back to us after Tara. After Warren. We thought that she knew that magic is,” and he showed his teeth in something that wasn’t quite a smile, “that magic has its own agenda. Magic wants to be used – and using it is addictive. We thought that once Willow had done the Twelve Step Programme, she would be the Willow we knew, and for a while, she was. For a while. There was Kennedy, and then, then there wasn’t, and then there was a search for something… I think it was… Kennedy called her a goddess once, and I think Willow came to believe it. She developed great power, but she lost… something. She stopped discriminating. She came to think that whatever she wanted was good _because_ she wanted it.

“In the end, Willow put my Slayers in danger.”

She heard the emphasis that he hadn’t used. _His_ Slayers.

“She always swore that whatever she was doing would be for the good of the Slayers, for the good of humanity, and then, then there was a, she wanted to raise Ereshkigal, to have the dead Slayers returned from the underworld. She thought that she could control a _goddess,_ a great Power. She was half way through the ritual when I found her. It would have destroyed us all.”

Her voice was no more than a breath. “You killed her.”

He set his hands flat on the table and looked her squarely in the face. “I strangled her with my bare hands, to stop her. She was the only one left who remembered, who understood, and I murdered her.”

She was shaking, crying silently for him, for Willow, for all of them who had fought and suffered and fought again.

“If you’re going to be a Watcher, Sanne, your hands will never be clean. Never. It’s a huge responsibility and it can carry a huge cost. Some people find it more than they’re willing to pay.”

She understood. He was giving her a chance to back out. She even thought, confusedly, that if she ran, now, he wouldn’t think any the worse of her. She didn’t know what to say to him. He held out a handkerchief, and when she didn’t take it, he deliberately dried her cheeks as if she was a child. The corners of her mouth turned down as she fought for self-control.

“I want to do it. I want to be a Watcher.”

He looked at her again, for a long moment, and nodded. “I think you have what it takes. Talk to the other Watchers. Talk to some of the Slayers. Take a week, Sanne, and then come back here and if you’re still of the same mind, we’ll swear you in.”

She picked up the papers and stood up; he rose, the stiffness of his joints obvious, and opened the door for her courteously. She smiled at him shakily.

“Thank you, Professor.”

He smiled back. “If you’re going to be a Watcher, you can call me Xander.”


End file.
